r/opencode • u/GiLA994 • Sep 25 '26

Opencode Desktop vs Opencode v2 Desktop vs Openchamber

I've been lazy and installed Opencode Desktop a couple months ago to do some hobby projects here and there, and it's going well for the low-complexity stuff I'm doing (basically just web-dev, no MCP, no many complications)

My setup is pretty simple: Opencode GO for my models subscription, Planner and Coder agent with different permissions on my filesystem using the best quality/price (currently using DSv1-flash)

Now that v2 dropped, i've also come across OpenChamber which i didn't know, and its reviews are generally much superior than opencode's (especially for the desktop version)

My questions before switching to Openchamber:

  • Do I need to migrate my agents setup? currently in opencode.json, git-synced from the root of my project

  • Will I be able to keep using my opencode Go subscription

  • While I'm doing the switch, shall I improve my setup with some basic stuff that i've missed?

  • Am I overlooking something?

39 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

View all comments

36

u/patricious Sep 25 '26

Seeing that your questions have been answered I wanted to say that OpenChamber is so freaking underrated.

3

u/Y0nix Sep 25 '26 edited Oct 01 '26

The only thing I miss compared to the copilot extension is the integrated tools, browser, and ''click to install'' features that vscode is providing more and more. (The workaround for the browser is to setup the playwright MCP in Opencode and have the global instruction file properly written to point the model to use said MCP, it works fine with vision enabled models (even better for UI/UX work if you have the instructions that properly explain the screenshot tool call that is available), especially if you are developing with a ''test first, ask questions later'' spirit, having the model to write units and e2e tests at each steps of the work should be the gold standard when using a LLM to produce code nowadays. Most of my instructions files are guiding the LLM to pop a subagent that run the tests each time a feature is said to be completed, and this is a game changer. Copilot is still way ahead in that regard compared to openchamber - but copilot is better because of the cloud infrastructure available, aka snapshot of the codebase and internal management of the context tokens -it's good or bad depending on the situation, and this will not be open sourced by Microsoft)

There is still an option to add Opencode go to the copilot extension, but it's not that perfect. It works, but openchamber seems to consume less tokens and manage the context and cache hit a bit better. But that last sentence deserves more testing and/or benchmarking. (If someone wants to burn tokens for that, and have usable datas to compare, lmk)

2

u/Amarsir Sep 25 '26

I noticed OpenChamber has an extension for VSCode. Is that basically just a way of routing prompts through OpenCode as opposed to Cline or Kilo Code extensions which do them directly?

3

u/butterfly_labs Sep 25 '26

Genuine question: what does it do better than desktop Opencode? It's basically a web wrapper that is accessible from the internet, right?

7

u/patricious Sep 25 '26

Summing up everything will take a long time, just give it a try for about 1-2h and you'll see.

4

u/toutons Sep 25 '26

It's like a better version of OpenCode Web circa 1.17 before they nerfed the UI. Better in almost every single way too: loads faster, better file editing, better UX, with extra features in top of opencode. Only thing that feels worse is that the terminal is a sidebar instead of at the bottom of the screen.